Saddam is a real threat

A man such as Saul Landau, who has managed against all the odds to persuade himself of the benignity of Stalin’s Soviet Union, will not be persuaded by me that Saddam Hussein poses a threat to the outside world. But he does pose such a threat. And whether or not readers of openDemocracy think that military action is the right way to counter the threat, neither they nor others ought to blind themselves to the fact that it exists.

Landau’s way of denying that it exists is to discuss other subjects. His article sermonises at length about what happened in the cold war (interesting but irrelevant). He excoriates the mainstream media for its gullibility (arguable but irrelevant). He brushes aside congressional and United Nations (UN) resolutions about Iraq on the grounds that the American administration merely ‘contrived the mobilisation of opinion’ (insulting but irrelevant). He retells the familiar story about how, during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, the Reagan administration was anxious to avoid an Iranian victory, and so helped Saddam to fend off defeat (true but irrelevant).

By contrast, weirdly absent from his exegesis are any facts and arguments that would support his headline assertion that Saddam poses no threat to the outside world. In particular, he skirts around the two most basic questions. Is this man seeking weapons of mass destruction? And if he acquires them, is there a danger that he will use them?

Judge Saddam by his record

As to whether Saddam is seeking such weapons, Landau says breezily that the Bushites have produced no facts. But all the available facts point in the same direction. That is to say, there exists overwhelming evidence that Saddam has sought in the past to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and that he did not cease his quest for them after his defeat in Kuwait in 1991.

Like many others, Landau quotes former UN Special Commission on Iraq(UNSCOM) inspector Scott Ritter’s opinion that Saddam’s ‘large-scale weapons of mass destruction programmes…had been fundamentally destroyed or dismantled by the weapons inspectors as early as 1996, so by 1998 we had under control the situation on the ground.’ But why rely on the testimony of one inspector who has gone on to make a career of his dissenting views? UNSCOM’s detailed, formal, final report of 1999 is available for all to see on the Internet, and I commend it. Readers of openDemocracy can approach it with an open mind. It says plainly that, because of methodical Iraqi cheating, and ‘in spite of the years that have passed and the extensive work that has been undertaken, it has not been possible to verify, fully, Iraq’s statements with respect to the nature and magnitude of its proscribed weapons programmes and their current disposition.’

Since 1998, moreover, when UNSCOM decided that it could no longer do its work in the teeth of systematic Iraqi obstruction, its inspectors have not been allowed to return to Iraq. So nobody, not even the supposedly omniscient Scott Ritter, knows what has happened there in the subsequent four years. Landau himself admits as much, in a perfunctory aside. ‘Since 1998,’ he allows, albeit in passing, ‘Saddam may have accumulated some weapons of dubious potency.’

Hang on. ‘May have produced’? ‘Dubious potency’? What do these cute phrases mean? Are we to ignore the fact that Iraq ‘may have produced’ weapons of mass destruction simply because Landau, citing no evidence, naming no authority, chooses to assert that in Iraqi hands such weapons must be of ‘dubious potency’? Why dubious? The chemical weapons Saddam used to slaughter Iranians and Kurds were all too potent. The ballistic missiles he fired over the years into Iranian, Saudi and Israeli cities found their targets. And no qualified person has seriously questioned the ability of Iraqi scientists to construct a nuclear weapon once they obtain the necessary fissile material.

It is true that they have probably not done so yet: Britain’s venerable joint intelligence committee concluded recently that Iraq was still a couple of years from a nuclear weapon. But Saddam’s determined attempts to build such weapons, and his attempts to conceal his efforts from the UNSCOM inspectors (he was exposed in the end only by Iraqi defectors), are an incontestable part of the historical record. To basic question number one – is Saddam seeking weapons of mass destruction? – the plain answer is yes.

Landau misses the target

If he acquired such weapons, would he use them? To this question there can be no equally plain answer. Outsiders need to make an informed guess. But bear in mind the importance of getting the answer right. If this serial starter of wars does one day use nuclear weapons, this could cost millions – repeat, millions – of lives. So anyone whose informed guess is that Saddam would never actually use the weapons he so plainly craves had better be very confident that they are right.

Saddam’s record inspires no such confidence. Indeed, how absurd of Landau to complain, as if this were somehow unjust, that the Bushites make an ad hominem case against Saddam. Ad hominem arguments could not be more to the point. Iraq’s dictator, after all, is just that: a dictator. He is, in fact, a far more absolute dictator than any Soviet leader since Stalin. At least Khrushchev, when he confronted America over missiles in Cuba, was hemmed in by an apparatus of domestic decision-making that constrained his freedom of action. Saddam operates under no such constraint. To the contrary, the Iraqi state is designed to carry out any order he issues without question. So if you want to know whether he will ever use a nuclear weapon, you have therefore to examine his past behaviour.

Saul Landau is so intent on showing that it is America’s elected leaders who are the knaves and fools that he passes swiftly (‘of course he’s a genuine bad hat…’) over Saddam’s record. But even the most perfunctory examination of that record produces two powerful themes. First – look only at the horrific Anfal campaign of near-genocide against the Kurds – is that Saddam is a believer in, and exponent of, the most extreme violence. Second – consider his unprovoked invasions of Iran and Kuwait – is his propensity to miscalculate the consequences of his actions.

There is no evidence that Saddam is suicidal. He is, therefore, ‘deterrable’ in some circumstances. But for deterrence to succeed it is not enough for actors to be rational. They must also be conservative, prudent, well advised, and well informed about the potential adversary. Saddam is none of these things. He is, quintessentially, the sort of man who in a crisis is liable to miscalculate or escalate, the last man whose finger you ever want near a nuclear button.

How does Landau propose to keep Saddam’s finger off the button? He doesn’t. The ‘genuine bad hat’ ‘may have’ some weapons of ‘dubious potency’, but his quest for nuclear ones is not to be taken seriously because…well, because those who do take it seriously are venomous Bushites deploying ad hominem arguments. Landau deplores the former policy of containment plus sanctions, because sanctions have inflicted great harm on Iraq’s people. But nor does he support the alternative policy of the Security Council (you know, the one ‘contrived’ by the United States) which gives Saddam a final chance to disarm in accordance with international law and the resolutions imposed on him a dozen years ago, or face the threat of force if he doesn’t. The actions of a Republican administration cannot be good, says Landau; therefore, an enemy it ‘demonises’ cannot really be all that bad. I’ve seldom read a more irresponsible and less persuasive tissue of polemic.